homicides, here in san francisco. it is great to be here tonight. >> my name is petra de jesus. i have been on the commission for about four years. >> joe marshall. i have been on the commission for ever. by end of my term, i will have broken the record. i have been here before, nice to see you again. >> thank you. commissioner tom mazzuco. i spent nine years here as a district attorney and i assisted the district attorney down the road as well.

it is great to be here. this is my favorite part about being on the commission, going into these communities. it is great to hear from the captain, hear from the community members, who we do not often see at city hall. we invite you to come down. >> good morning, -- evening, my name is angela chan. this is my first meeting as a commissioner, but i have attended meetings before as a citizen. i specialize in juvenile justice issues. i work on the immigrant rights and the juvenile issues. i am originally from portland, oregon. i had worked for a federal court judge managing a 100-case

docket. happy to be here. >> my name is carol kingsley. i have lived in san francisco for over 30 years, raised my kids here, i am an attorney. i spend most of my professional life doing business transactions. over the last seven years, working independently as a mediator. thank you for hosting this meeting tonight. it is a pleasure to be with you. >> with that, could you please call item no. 1? >> reports to the commission under which item 1a is the chief report,, 1b the occ director's report. >> good evening, chief.

>> good evening, mr. president, members of the occ. it is a pleasure to be here today. we have a couple of autumn that i want to cover in our report before we turn it over to capt. garrity. he will go over a state of the union for the tenderloin. on crime numbers, we continue to be around the 10% crime reduction. we had a very good production last week. and other crimes went down 17% in the last four weeks. property crime was down 19%.

basically, what we are talking about today, we are down to 280 crimes compared to last year. we are down 190 mileage crimes. 2570 property crimes for a total of 2760. before i move on to the presentation, i wanted to give you a quick update as to some personnel movements and i also want to talk about an area that we have been working on for several weeks, having to do with robbery. we have been spending a lot of time doing analysis, and today we want to take the opportunity publicly to start putting out what i consider important information for the public. we will continue to do so for

the next few days. we want to minimize victimization. one of the things that we did was come up there are a number of things the public can do to fight robbery, and then i will go into the presentation. as you know, there have been some personnel movements. we finalized that earlier today and we have a number of promotions. to the rank of assistant chief, denise smith. she will be running our administrative services. also rank of assistant chief, captain tom sawyer will be running our chief of staff. needless to say, we have a great deal of confidence in these individuals and bring a great deal of wealth to the organization

she was the acting chief there. capt. sawyer has tremendous experience in the chief of staff office. he worked for chief fung. he is someone that understand the organization intimately, the inner workings of the commission, community. to the rank of commander, we are promoting two individuals, captain lazard. he will be in charge of the investigation bureau. he has done an incredible job for this organization. as you recall, he was the one you've selected to be the pilot stationed.

that is something that we have taken citywide. that brought incredible professionalism to the police department, something that we take to heart and coulcontinue o implement for the city. >> [inaudible] >> of course, the people of and will side will be disappointed that he will be living there permanently -- ingleside will be disappointed that he will be living there permanently. we also have lt. dan mahoney, someone who has experience in the internal investigation, a proven track record, and he is being promoted to the rank of commander. he will be heading the newly

created internal affairs division. the new structure will be an internal affairs which includes administrative, allegations of misconduct internally. the criminal section which will deal with allegations of criminal misconduct by members of the organization. this was an error that we determined in the process of the investigation, this was a tremendous weakness for us. frankly, there were some failures that occurred in communications. best practices around the country are that you have internal affairs and criminal work under the same umbrella. obviously, you need some separation of these organizations, but having them work together is incredibly

important. all criminal investigations and the biandend up being administr. we are excited about that. next week there will be some capt. promotions, and we will be ready to announce those once we conclude the reduced -- reviews. >> if i may, could we clap for the motion? [applause] >> thank you. what i would like to do briefly is half the director gave you -- have the director give you a quick update on the robberies. the reason we are doing this in this forum is this was completed

today, and we believe there is a wealth of information, things people can do to prevent becoming a victim. we will be meeting with the community to get the word out. we felt this would be a wonderful opportunity to use the commission as a vehicle to get the information out. >> thank you. my name is lance of the land, a new director for the bay area regional crime center. our focus is day to day crimes and addressing it in a real time manner. making sure the intermission officials have madneed -- inforn officials may have it. we work with the crime analysis unit. in the past month, they have investigated 662 robbery

accounts. we are identifying key things that we can identify as messages to the public to help them present -- prevent themselves from becoming a victim of crime. 60% of the incidence include people using iphone, ipod, or similar device. they are diverting their attention. particularly iphone and ipods were targeted. father times include walking to and from work, at the bus stop, running errands. also, loan victims are most likely target. realistically, i think we only had two cases with three or more victims together simultaneously. the majority were people walking by themselves.

63% of the lone suspect conducted the robbery. often it is one person making that contact. 23% included a gun. 63% used bodily force to commit robbery. strong armed robbery that is a high profile than to look for. 72% of the time, the suspect walked up to the victim. they did not go in their car, they just walked up to them. these are some of the key factors we are looking out for citizens. we are glad to answer any questions. >> the point that became very evident to us is paying attention to your surroundings are contributing to being a victim. people in 60% of the cases were

using their cell phone, ipod, and were confronted by one individual. it is important to recognize, especially when you are walking alone, doing your daily activities, even if you have to use or cell phone, you have to be aware of your surroundings. the other thing we are not discussing yet, we identified certain parts of the city that clearly have the greatest risk. we will be putting enforcement and other different strategies out there. we are going to get that to the community. that information will be made public. we thought it was so important in these initial stages to let the community know about the importance of being aware of your surroundings. if you must use your phone or ipod, please look around.

if you see someone approaching, keep an eye to eye contact. and there is some psychology involved in robberies. if you can look away, and will facilitate your being a victim. we are planning to do a full- court press release on this. we will work with the police community advisory board and other forms in order to get this information out. >> thank you for the presentation. two questions. i am sure there have been collaborations' regarding muni with robbery concerns. i know that they had a campaign directed at youth, particularly ipod come iphone --, iphones, and they came up with a card

that taught young people how to take care of themselves. >> the majority of the victims were adults. we did not necessarily see minors being targeted alone. that just may be something for the summer. we really saw the victimization applied mostly to adults. ipods are becoming pretty common for all of us. >> i would encourage working with muni, handing out those cards. i think they also translated it, too. with regards to the press work that will be done, one to urge the ethnic press to attend, so that people who are short on the

english language have all of the correct information. >> that is correct. i know we have representatives from the chinese community here. we will be working with all the media outlets as we work on the campaign. >> first, i want to acknowledge how -- >> i wanted to do that. [applause] >> i ended up taking her seat, large shoes to fill on the police commission. she also led the effort to select chief gascoigne. chief, we talked about the murder of a german tourist. this week, there were three homicides within a 24-hour

period. it sounds like the staff are still good, but it is pretty shocking to have three murders within 24 hours. >> we are doing the work on some of these cases. although we believe there were different circumstances in all three cases, we believe there is a correlation with one particular gang. not necessarily of the homicides were connected to one another. we believe it might be the case that this is one gang. it is a work in progress. i am glad that you raised the issue of the german tourist. we feel strongly we have identified the suspect in the case and we feel confident that we can obtain arrest warrants from the secretary's office. it is obviously generating a

great deal of publicity now. these other three cases, i believe that we will be able to resolve all three of them. our homicide clearance rate, although i do not have it in front of me, is very high. we are exceeding the national average and we plan to do so. we are aggressively working older homicides as well. we have been able to solve some. if it is important for the public to realize, especially families of victims of prior cases. they are not being ignored. we have a cold case detective working on these and will continue to do so. >> thank you, chief. >> well we are educating the

public on these robbers, do we have an idea the time of day these are occurring, -- and a recommendation to give to the public? >> interestingly enough, a lot of these incidents you would think our early or late at night. typically saturday morning, friday night. but also, when people are walking home from work, business meetings, walking home from dinner. oftentimes, it is very opportunistic. that is why we are focusing on behavior rather than location. there are some targeted places that we are working on defining so we can generate a plan of attack that way, early evening hours -- there was a lot of

that. typically, toward the later part of the week. >> i have been taught as a prosecutor, after an 11:00 at night, dark streets, they can identify their victims, possibly someone coming home from the bar. >> we do these specific evaluation on our locations, and that only made up 5% of incidents. there were some that were trailed home from the bar, but the majority were coming prior to the bar is closing. >> as you get this information, i do not know if this is a targeted area, but we need to

get the information out to the public. if that is possible, great. i am sure you will let us know if that is a possibility. >> absolutely. we plan to use community ambassadors. we hope that that is a program that continues to grow. important to note, these are crimes on the street, these are not occurring on muni. we want people to understand, the people who think they are likely not going to be a victim, walking in the early evening, in their 20's, 30's -- it is okay, we all use our cell phones. ipods just pop out in our data, so we just wanted to focus on that. if there are no questions, we

will botmoved to the presentatin on the and a backlog. -- dna backlog. >> thank you, chief. tonight, i will provide an overview of the crime laboratory as it relates to dna. i know, commissioner, you have posed some questions. if there is something we are missing, we will definitely get back to you right away on these particular aspects. i will cover dna as it results from sexual assault. we have one supervisor and six analysts currently in the dna section of the seventh disco -- san francisco crime lab. i also want to acknowledge

captain mike stern who is in the audience. he may have to answer a couple of questions. as of today, there are 28 sexual assault cases that are being worked on in the lab. there is a same number going through a technical review process. the analyst doesn't work, gives it to a supervisor, who does the review. out of those cases, 16 are stranger suspect cases. the backlog as of today, three cases. what i want to be clear about is we are -- the department defines a backlog as a case that has not yet been assigned to an analyst or has not yet been contacted out. the definition is common in the industry, although not exclusive. there are no backlog cases with regard to homicides at this

time. we get those cases assigned or contracted out. i will go over some of the protocol safeguards that we have put in place to prevent that from happening. one of the questions asked was how many cases were completed or mailed out by the lab last week? for clarification, what that means is how many cases were closed and sent it back? 10 total. two homicides, one was a known suspect, one was on known, six sexual assaults, all known, one arson case suspect unknown. the next question of how many cases were accepted for dna testing by the lab last week. 3. last week we received a case for a homicide. two were for the station investigation team.

what has been contracted out? as of today, 30 uncases regarding dna on firearms, a less than sexual assault cases. of the current backlog, how old is the oldest untested case? from our records, 2004. recently, we had a 1998 case. we have a cold case unit that is working aggressively to solve some of the older homicides. at times, they want older cases to be looked at again. our oldest currently is from 2004. usually, -- there are several reasons that happens. somebody may want the evidence looked at again. sometimes, we have the supervisor take a second look once the case is done. there is a few reasons why the older case is being looked at.

but out of the 28 cases that are being worked on, approximately half of them are from 2010. so when we think about backlogs, only half of them are from this year alone, so we are moving along. this speaks to the tenacity of the analysts in the unit. these are the procedures that we employ. if we get a case that comes in that requires board, we will begin working on that case. the question posed, why was a larger backlog number previously reported? how confident are we that the

numbers are correct? we are very confident. we are working on the numbers every day. we're working to make presentations to you. the earlier number was the result of a manual check in our lab database. i think we were putting out numbers, thinking they were backlog, but there are really open -- it is a matter of semantics. what are the best practices on dna and rape cases? it is important to know what is happening outside of san francisco. we survey pipe lines, san diego county, lapd, alameda county, santa clara, san mateo county. a cursory review shows that our

work is largely similar to other labs. best practice in the short term would include prayer regarding stranger cases. in the long term, hiring two specialized criminalists as recommended by the comptroller's office and continue to support the products for implementation and will produce greater efficiencies. on the spreadsheet i have here, turn around time in days for sexual assault cases? 90 days. lapd, 90. santa clara, 90. alameda, 30 to 30. the stranger suspect case priorities -- is it a priority? san diego, yes, santa clara, it depends on trial needs. alameda county, as needed.

our department, yes. definition of a backlog in san diego county means it is unassigned. in lapd, unassigned. to declare, unassigned. alameda, over 30 days. sfpd, unassigned. that is what i mean by industry standards. staff numbers and forensic biology unit. san diego county, 21 . the lapd, 27. santa clara county, 20. alameda, eight. our department, seven total. average number of new sex cases requested monthly. lapd, 112. santa clara, 20. alameda, three. san mateo, seven. our department, 17. that i